Fyre Festival’s Post-Mortems: We’ve Still Got Questions

Two documentaries examining Billy McFarland’s debacle aim to shed new light on the scammers and victims.

Hosted by Jon Caramanica; produced by Pedro Rosado.

Jan. 25, 2019

The Fyre Festival, which imploded publicly and spectacularly in April 2017, was meant to be the ne plus ultra of music festivals — an opportunity for moderate-level influencers to get up close and personal with peak-level influencers, and the beginning of a boondoggle empire for the entrepreneur Billy McFarland.

Its collapse was witnessed in real time on social media, providing a source of seemingly endless schadenfreude. But there was more to the story.

This month, competing documentaries about the fiasco were released within a few days of each other: “Fyre,” on Netflix, and “Fyre Fraud,” on Hulu. They take differing approaches. “Fyre” is a relentless and still somewhat glossy play-by-play of the festival’s planning, or lack thereof. “Fyre Fraud” hopes to answer larger questions about the generation that made Fyre seem like a great, and viable, idea in the first place.

Discussing the films — and the victims, villains and scammers they capture — on this week’s Popcast are: